It all started with a big bang has been the commonly accepted origin story of our universe for decades. But what if it’s wrong?
What if, before starting 13 billion years ago as a tiny ball of incomprehensibly hot gas exploding with unimaginable force and expanding eternally into an inexplicable nothingness, our universe evolved from another universe which in turn evolved from another?
Julian Gough, the Irish author, playwright and one-time musician, has unveiled a cosmological theory he believes may better explain the origins of our universe than widely accepted theories.
He admits there will be blowback for the “blowtorch theory” published on his cosmology website The Egg and the Rock but is not fazed by the criticism that will come his way.
The author, who wrote the last chapter of Minecraft and whose novels have been published in 37 languages, has seen his website achieve a cult following driven by his successful prediction, before the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sent back its first data in 2022, that it would observe extremely early, rapid galaxy formation, with those galaxies dominated by supermassive black holes.
His predictions saw many scientists actively helping him to develop the new theory and attracted funding from Emergent Ventures (run by the economist and polymath Tyler Cowen), and O’Shaughnessy Ventures (run by the venture capital investor, quant pioneer, and former board chair of Stability AI, Jim O’Shaughnessy).
His theory posits the idea that sustained, powerful jets from supermassive black holes in the extremely early universe “actively carved the large-scale structure of the universe we see all around us today, including galaxies, cosmic voids, and filament”.
He said the JWST “has shaken the faith of many cosmologists, astronomers and astrophysicists in their models” adding that the telescope’s observations “are causing ongoing chaos and I’m the only guy who accurately predicted, at every stage, what it would see”.
Gough’s blowtorch theory and the evolutionary cosmology is, he suggested, “more exciting and attractive right now than the mainstream theory, ‘lambda cold dark matter’, which, after 50 years of constant tweaking, still didn’t see any of this coming”.
The blowtorch theory “is a product of three-stage cosmological natural selection, or what we’re now starting to call evolutionary cosmology”, Gough said, that draws much from evolutionary biology and “has huge explanatory and predictive power when applied to our universe”.
The core idea is that our universe evolved, in the Darwinian sense, and that it’s descended from earlier, simpler universes, which reproduced through black holes.
“Evolution has therefore fine tuned our particular universe to produce, first, some supermassive black holes, which then generate stars and thus galaxies around themselves, which generate many more secondary, star-sized black holes but also the periodic table of the elements, which generate planets, which generate life, which generates technology, which generates huge numbers of small, technologically produced third-stage black holes (for extremely efficient, sustainable, long-term energy production),” Gough said.
“Each of these three evolved developmental steps helps the universe reproduce more efficiently, by generating more black holes – more offspring – from the same amount of matter.”
His conclusion is that “biology is the first half of the periodic table coming to life; technology is the second half of the periodic table coming to life in an evolved developmental process that helps the universe to reproduce”.
According to Gough, the mainstream approach “has always been, there is one universe, and everything that happens in it is random and arbitrary, and life is just this weird, unlikely accident”.
“But that mainstream approach has great difficulty explaining the extremely rapid, efficient, step-by-step development of our universe since the big bang, from a ball of hot gas to the hyper-sophisticated world we live in. And, unfortunately for the status quo, predictions based on evolutionary cosmology now massively outperform predictions made using the old approach.”
Some recent developments seem to be working in the theory’s favour. Late last month, Nasa reported that an international team of astronomers using the JWST “identified bright hydrogen emission from a galaxy in an unexpectedly early time in the universe’s history”.
“The surprise finding is challenging researchers to explain how this light could have pierced the thick fog of neutral hydrogen that filled space at that time,” it said.
Gough said the findings could be explained by an “enormous jet from a supermassive black hole”.
Not everyone is convinced. One Irish-based scientist dismissed Gough’s work out of hand: “This looks like crazy stuff to me and I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.” Others are far less dismissive.
We need a more open-minded dialogue between mainstream and unconventional lines of research to escape the dead end we manoeuvred ourselves into
— Dr Jenny Wagner
Dr Jenny Wagner, a German cosmologist, physicist and author based at the Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Helsinki, told The Irish Times Gough has developed “an interesting idea”.
She noted that standard observational cosmology collects evidence to track the evolution of the cosmos from the first picture we have, which, she argued, goes from “the rather homogeneous and isotropic cosmic microwave background to the highly complex landscape it has become with all its galaxy clusters, galaxies, stars, and planets”.
Wagner said it was possible to “only observe and draw conclusions from the single universe we happen to live in. These are the huge drawbacks. It is like studying medicine on a single patient.”
She suggested the extremes of thinking were the anthropic principle, where “the universe is as it is because we are here to observe it, because we are special” and the “nihilistic answer that everything that is possible is actually created, so there should not be a single universe with fine-tuned conditions for life, but rather a multitude of universes (a multimultiverse) realising every possible scenario.
“Between these extreme ends, the blowtorch theory assumes that there is an evolution of universes. Complexity increases with every step forward and builds upon the previous stage.”
Wagner said an “intriguing part of the blowtorch theory stays at the level of observationally testable predictions in our cosmos: it raises highly important questions on the validity of our current concordance model in cosmology. For instance, do we really need dark matter to explain our observations?
Dark matter supposedly contributes 85 per cent of the total matter content of the universe. It is a single and elegant concept that can successfully explain many data sets from the cosmic microwave background to the non-linear structures we observe today.
“However, after more than half a century of dark-matter research, all we have is indirect evidence. Cern and other experiments like DAMA/LIBRA, XENONnT or IceCube have not found any particle candidate.”
[ Euclid space telescope reveals exquisite images of dark universeOpens in new window ]
She said the problem “lies in the fact that the inconsistencies in our current data do not hint at specific alternative models. There are many ways to resolve the issues, as well. Hence, we need more blowtorches to shed light in a 95 per cent dark and mysterious cosmological model. In particular, we need a more open-minded dialogue between mainstream and unconventional lines of research to escape the dead end we manoeuvred ourselves into.”
Clément Vidal, a philosopher at the Vrije University Brussels in Belgium, said Gough “paints an accurate picture of the crisis in cosmological models, as they are having a hard time to accommodate new observational data from JWST”.
He said theories in cosmology “are in a dark age, and the present crisis deserves to be addressed with new thinking”.
He noted that previously Gough predicted using an evolutionary take on cosmology drawing on Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection that galaxies should form as early as 100 million years after the big bang.
He said evolutionary theory and thinking have been “successfully extended well beyond the biological realm, into culture, technology but also economics or psychology. Evolutionary cosmology continues this extension, and offers a new paradigm for cosmology. This is still early, and more effort is needed to further test new predictions, ideally with more detailed models making even more specific predictions, published in peer-reviewed articles so that more scientists can engage in this fascinating debate.”
Johannes Jaeger, an evolutionary biologist, systems thinker and philosopher based at the University of Vienna, said Gough’s James Webb predictions “should stand as evidence that he is certainly no crackpot”.
He accepted that while “evolutionary cosmology may be speculative at this point” it could “contain the kind of explanation that could tell us why the parameters of the universe are fine tuned the way they are. At least, it seems to me, somebody in the physics community should be open to having a look at this theory”, and while Gough’s ideas “are no doubt speculative [they] are definitely worthy of checking out. Isn’t this how science was meant to work?”
